AMD Releases Live! Hardware Specs

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Advanced Micro Devices has released the first hardware specifications to get its AMD Live! consumer-electronics plan up and running, although the vision will have to wait until at least 2007 to be realized.

AMD executives said this week that the technology would roll out in at least two phases, the first one of which may be delivered in 2007.

Strategically, AMD’s Live! technology also represents a counterpoint to Intel’s “Viiv” – the two words even rhyme. Both words encapsulate a grand strategy to insinuate their own technologies in front of the user, making them the entry point to the digital home.AMD. This week, Intel has crafted its stage at the Intel Developer Forum to discuss Viiv, while AMD executives discussed their Live! technology in briefings with reporters.

First disclosed at the CES show this past January, AMD’s Live! is actually a software innovation, a piece of middleware the company is developing for set-top boxes and other consumer devices that may or may not have have AMD silicon inside of them. The technology would let a set-top box overlay PC elements or a GUI on top of the display; an example used by Teresa de Onis, AMD’s Athlon64 brand manager, would run NASCAR’s interactive TrackPath application on top of the video itself.

“We really believe the power of PC is there to deliver a media application projected or overlaid on the TV screen,” de Onis said. “We do not believe the television experience should ever be disrupted.”

The description subtly distinguishes Live! from the concept of a Media PC, which treats the video stream as just another multimedia object. Live! does not want the PC as part of the critical path, de Onis said. It’s a conceptual idea that AMD is working hard to deliver, using sports broadcasts and online shopping as key applications, she said.

“A Lexus commercial on a TiVo box is a great example,” de Onis said. “When you view the commercial, it tells you to press the green button for more information. What that does is it tells you to open a web browser on your PC and go to www.lexus.com. Wouldn’t it be great if it actually opened a web browser when you did that?”

This week, AMD released its preliminary specifications for a Live! enabled PC. Although the technology itself is advanced, the specifications describe a fairly typical next-generation PC: either a dual-core Athloxn X2 microprocessor or FX chip; either a Media Center Edition or Vista operating system; a Serial ATA hard drive or RAID array; either a single or dual-GPU graphics card that can run the basic “Aero” interface of Vista; and a low-RPM power supply, required to eliminate the noise that might interfere with the television experience.

Interestingly, the Live! specifications do not describe the interface that will be used to connect the PC to the set-top box. A certified 802.11 Wi-Fi connection is listed as an option, and de Onis said that manufacturers will have the choice of selecting which technology will be used.

“The key for our OEM customers is to be able to choose a best-of-breed solution that they can provide,” she said. “They’re not locked into a particular chipset, and can pick and choose from a variety of options.”

The first phase in AMD’s Live! vision, however, will simply be to get people to use their Media Center PCs as they’re supposed to. AMD’s de Onis said that company has performed studies that found that users only took advantage of a fraction of their capabilities. From there, the company will work to push photos and digital content the user already owns – such as digital photos from a camera — around the home. This first phase won’t happen for at least another year, she said.

AMD executives offered few other news bits, besides an emphasis to focus the industry on the power used by enterprise-class CPUs in the server space. Four-core enterprise chips will be delivered in 2007. AMD will reveal its logos for the Live! program on Thursday.

As AMD has said previously, De Onis reported that the company would deliver AMD AM2 processors during the second quarter. The shift to a new, incompatible pinout will mean that new motherboards will be required for the new generation of processors, which will contain an integrated DDR-2 memory controller.

Likewise, AMD will launch its dual-core Turion64 X2 processors in the second quarter, David Rooney, AMD’s Turion64 brand manager, said. A complementary Turion64 X2 logo will also be announced, he said.

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